Comment by dghlsakjg
20 hours ago
But we already know that they can make a smaller iPhone with everything.
The iPhone 6 was a decade ago and was smaller in all dimensions than an iPhone 17 and had a perfectly acceptable battery life. Since then, they have removed headphone jacks and buttons, batteries have gotten more power dense, chips have gotten more efficient, etc.
They used to be able to. I don't think they can anymore. The iPhone 6 was 3 years after Jobs died. Apple's corporate/engineering culture has had 12 additional years to rot since then. If the Scott Forstall situation, Chris Lattner situation, etc, tells you anything, it's that Apple cannot make basic, common-sense tradeoffs anymore. All they can do is copy whatever the wider industry is doing.
All of the excuses people are coming up with in these comments are just that: excuses. Look at the sibling comment by musictubes, for example. Citing these ethereal "crfitics" and "most people" when in reality Walt Mossberg was the only critic whose opinion mattered.
Occam's Razor: The Innovator's Dilemma. It's a rotting, bloated megacorp with too much to lose, that doesn't take risks, and can't change direction. The direction it's in is "bigger phones", for whatever reason. So we're gonna keep getting bigger phones. That's all there is to it.
It’s the camera and Face ID. The camera on the iPhone 6 is nowhere near as capable current cameras. Even the much improved camera on the last iPhone SE was considered a huge issue by most people. Cameras are too important to go back to something that thin. The current Air is leaps and bounds better in every way to the iPhone 6 but it doesn’t sell. Why? The battery life and camera. Imagine shrinking the iPhone Air and having even less battery life. Critics would howl and even fewer people would buy it.
Smaller phones can’t fit as much stuff in them as larger phones. Shrink the phone and something has to give. People in the aggregate do not want to make those compromises unless the price is noticeably less. But then it can’t have any of the premium features that are expected from Apple. Small phones are compromises that don’t pay off for Apple.
Reading this on my 6s, and it’s still great.